Book

I, Pencil
The classic, short essay by Leonard E. Read remains one of the best introductions to the unseen complexity of the free market system. Read it for FREE at econlib.org
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Michal Malice
The White Pill

The Russian Revolution was as red as blood. The Bolsheviks promised that they were building a new society, a workers’ paradise that would change the nature of mankind itself. What they ended up constructing was the largest prison that the world had ever seen, a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that spanned half the globe. It was a country where people's lives meant nothing, less than nothing—and they knew it. But no matter what atrocity that the Soviets committed—the secret police, the torture chambers, the show trials, the labor camps and the mass starvation—there was always someone in the West rushing to justify their bloodshed. For decades it seemed perfectly obvious that the USSR wasn’t going anywhere—until it vanished from the face of the earth, gradually and then suddenly. This is the story of the rise and fall of that evil empire, and why it is so important for the good to never give up hope. This is the white pill.
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Ludwig von Mises
Liberalism in the Classical Tradition

In 1927, classical liberalism, based on a belief in individualism, reason, capitalism, and free trade, was dying, when one of the 20th century's greatest social thinkers wrote this combative and convincing restatement. Nowhere are the key principles of Mises' philosophy better represented than in this timeless work.
Mises was a careful and logical theoretician who believed that ideas rule the world, and this especially comes to light in Liberalism.
"The ultimate outcome of the struggle" between liberalism and totalitarianism, say Mises, "will not be decided by arms, but by ideas. It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales."
David Friedman
The Machinery of Freedom

This book argues for a society organized by voluntary cooperation under institutions of private property and exchange with little, ultimately no, government. It describes how the most fundamental functions of government might be replaced by private institutions, with services such as protecting individual rights and settling disputes provided by private firms in a competitive market. It goes on to use the tools of economic analysis to attempt to show how such institutions could be expected to work, what sort of legal rules they would generate, and under what circumstances they would or would not be stable. The approach is consequentialist. The claim is that such a society would produce more attractive outcomes, judged by widely shared values, than alternatives, including the current institutions of the U.S. and similar societies.The second edition contained four sections, this third edition adds two more. One explores some of the ideas already raised in greater depth, including discussions of decentralized law enforcement in past legal systems, of rights seen not as a moral or legal category but as a description of human behavior, of a possible threat to the stability of the system not considered in the previous editions, and of ways in which a stateless society might defend itself from aggressive states. The final section introduces a number of new topics, including unschooling, the misuse of externality arguments in contexts such as population or global warming, and the implications of public key encryption and related online technologies.
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